Lenten Devotion from RadicalDiscipleship

RadicalDiscipleship invites you to journey with us through the 40 days of Lent by reading and reflecting daily on Martin Luther’s King’s “Beyond Vietnam,” March 1-April 16

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Haiku from The Riverside Sermon

“Beyond Vietnam: Time to Break Silence” contains so many beautiful phrases characteristic of Dr. King’s stirring oratory. The following are haiku created by Arlene Goldbard by selecting text from the sermon:

break the betrayal
of my own silences and
speak from my own heart

their questions suggest
that they do not know the world,
the field of moral vision

attack it as such
war, enemy of the poor
the cruel irony

boys on TV screens
kill and die for a nation,
never live on the same block

I have walked among
the desperate, rejected
and angry young men

no one can ignore the war
to speak for the weak
for victims of our nation

weep as the bulldozers roar
destroy precious trees
their land and their crops

what liberators?
there is little left to build
on save bitterness

we may learn and grow
and profit from the wisdom
called opposition

this madness must cease
I speak as a child of God
brother to the poor

I speak for the poor
who pay the double price
of smashed hopes and death